Not exactly a complicated or controversial command on the surface: “you shall not steal.” Families, neighbors, tribes, nations or any other form of civilization all share a sense that you cannot take what is not yours. Granted the definition of “mine” can get a bit dicey, but few can argue against the command not to steal. We start this at a young age: “You can not take Johnny’s toy without asking” or “You can not walk out of the mini-mart without paying for that candy bar!” Petty theft is nipped at the bud for, in the mind of many responsible for discipline, the slide between pilfering and grand larceny is a slippery one.

Then it gets complicated. Students are tempted to steal papers off the internet. Politicians and preachers are enticed by the prospects of good material just a click away. Who will know? If it’s for a good end, what’s the difference? The slippery slope of the theft of intellectual property is a dangerous ride for many. Some prominent leaders have tumbled not just for reasons of sex scandals (that get the headlines) but by reason of the theft of ideas. Just this week we lost a member of the Bush Administration for reasons of plagiarism; ironically, the person to serve as liaison with religious groups.

The lines get complicated. As you know, I regularly print my sermons. I include footnotes (not all that common a practice for preachers before me) for I have decided to err on the side of full disclosure, even if the reader doesn’t particularly care or finds the footnotes intrusive. Yet what happens when a speaker takes a concept and works it over with his own ideas and never directly quotes the author that got him on that track in the first place? Is that theft? Barack Obama got some flack for using historical references made by a colleague who is working in his campaign. Certainly not plagiarism, but it raises some curious questions about persons who have the staff to do research and write papers. What about that politician with speech writers or professor with the fleet of graduate research assistants: how do you honestly borrow but not steal?

Pete Seeger, the folk singer, was noted for saying that “plagiarism is the source of all creativity.” A bit of hyperbole, no doubt, but as a folk singer, all the material comes “from the folk.” The line between “mine” and “ours” is a bit gray isn’t it? Since we all are products of a community and a culture, just what constitutes an original idea?

A small group of members have been watching a film series on the Ten Commandments by the Polish director, Krystof Kieslowski. It’s a dark and gritty series. For this commandment “do not steal” he chose the story of a family struggle with the theft around the issue of identity and story. The family includes a six-year-old girl being raised as if her young mother was her sister and her grandmother her mother. After six years of struggle, the young mother decides that she can no longer “play the game.” It is a troubling look at what it means to give life or steal life. Kieslowski is not moving within the arena of law but within the human heart. What does it mean to give a life or to take away a life? What does it mean to foster the life of a child or to hold her back, to keep her under a thumb or under control, even the control of a false story? Some of the worst theft is completely legal. And that puts us back to the Bible and the Ten Commandments.

As I’ve said nearly every week of this series on the Ten Commandments, the context makes all the difference. Following the slave rebellion that we call “the exodus” Moses found himself in the rather difficult position of leading a band of former slaves into the promised land. Along the way, Moses was given the gift of the law. It is gift. Slaves suffer under the reality that there are no laws that protect; free people are gifted and protected by the law. The law is gift, not burden... something that any harmed or exploited person knows all too well. The command, “you shall not steal” is not only a gift to keep the poor from the property of the rich, it is to protect the poor. Slaves had no rights; free people have rights. The Jews were now free.

“You shall not steal.” That begs the question: what is mine and what is yours? What about the air? the water? Some of the most difficult questions we are facing as nations fall along these very complicated lines of ownership. In a less than subtle way, I have linked the command “you shall not steal” with the other biblical mandate that farmers are to leave a portion of their crops for the poor and the alien to glean. Gleaning - the picking over of a field of the viable remains of the harvest - is a rather fascinating form of public assistance with immigrants and the poor. The practice is referenced frequently in the Bible and the passage from Deuteronomy specifically ties the gleaning rights of the poor, orphan and alien to the memory of being enslaved in Egypt. In Egypt they had no rights, no property. As a community of freed followers of Yahweh, the Israelites understood that the poor, the orphan and the alien have rights to the fields. Not handouts, but rights. If the farmer harvested to the edges and picked up everything, then that farmer would be stealing from what rightfully belonged to the poor.

Isn’t the Bible wonderfully provocative? The definition of stealing spins around the question of what is rightfully mine, yours or ours.

Roman Catholic sister and social critic Joan Chittister commits her chapter on the commandment “you shall not steal” to the issue of the disparity of pay in many American corporations. While it is completely legal, I fully agree with her that the radical increase in CEO pay in the last twenty years is a form of theft. The numbers are rather striking: Forbes Magazine (from their web site) reported that the CEOs of the nation’s 500 largest companies received an aggregate 54% increase in compensation in just one year from 2003 to 2004. Back in 2006 the business community reeled under the news that the CEOs of Pfizer and Home Depot each got severance packages of over 200 million dollars (it makes one wonder what they would have been paid for good performance!) As recently as 1980 the average CEO of an American company received 42 times the pay of the average worker. By 1990 it had grown to 85 times the average worker and in the year 2000 the average CEO made 531 times the compensation of the average worker of their own company. (The Ten Commandments, p. 86) This is legal, but I’d call it theft. The question spins not just around the question of greed but around the question of who owns the resources of a company.

What is so intriguing about the biblical rights of the poor, orphan and alien to glean the fields of a Jewish farmer is that the poor own that portion of the crop. It is not a handout, but theirs to take.

So, who owns the air and the water? We are residents of the Chesapeake Bay, our beloved and struggling body of water, suffering from runoff from development and fertilizers and waste from farms. What does it mean to steal the Bay? What does it mean to be a citizen of Maryland, the United States, the global community? We have some hard theological and political work to do in order to find a more just and sustainable future.

“You shall not steal.” It all spins around a sense of what is mine, yours, ours and intersects with the biblical concept that the law, in part, is to protect the powerless.

I’ve had a very strange and intense time with family this week with a host of phone calls, Halsey & Jolynn (older son with girlfriend) visiting from NYC and trips to Newark, Delaware. At an appropriate time I’ll give the details. But, let’s just say that I encountered one of those intense times of being a family. And, in the week of prayer and discussion, Kieslowski’s film has floated through the back of my mind--how we give life or steal it and how the stories we lay on each other can give or take life. We all face these questions on a regular basis: how do I give or withhold love... can I control or do I need to let go.

Two weeks ago at the opening devotion of our staff meeting (we open each meeting with a devotion and close in prayer for you), Al asked each of us to complete the phrase: “to love is to...” My mind quickly turned to the rather warm and affirming sentiment “to love is to embrace mutual respect and care.” Two others cut to the quick: “To love is to let go.” Living in faith is to give life, not take it; to let go, not control... lest we claim for ourselves what is not ours to take.

“You shall not steal.”